Download American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer AudioBook Free
American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to fully capture the awesome fire of sunlight for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation–one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the results of scientific progress.
He was the author of the radical proposal to put international controls over atomic materials–an idea that continues to be relevant today. He opposed the introduction of the hydrogen bomb and criticized mid-air Force’s plans to fight an infinitely dangerous nuclear war. Within the now almost-forgotten hysteria of the early 1950s, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of an enormous nuclear buildup, and, in response, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, Superbomb advocate Edward Teller and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked behind the scenes to truly have a hearing board find that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America’s nuclear secrets.
American Prometheus sets forth Oppenheimer’s life and times in revealing and unprecedented detail. Exhaustively researched, it is dependant on a large number of records and letters gathered from archives in the us and abroad, on massive FBI files and on near to 100 interviews with Oppenheimer’s friends, relatives and colleagues.
We follow him from his earliest education at the turn of the twentieth century at New York City’s Ethical Culture School, through personal crises at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Then to Germany, where he studied quantum physics with the world’s most accomplished theorists; and also to Berkeley, California, where he established, during the 1930s, the best American school of theoretical physics, and where he became deeply involved with social justice causes and their advocates, many of whom were communists. Then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he transformed a bleak mesa in to the world’s most potent nuclear weapons laboratory–and where he himself was transformed. And finally, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which he directed from 1947 to 1966.
American Prometheus is a rich evocation of America at midcentury, a new and compelling portrait of an excellent, ambitious, complex and flawed man profoundly linked to its major events–the Depression, World War II and the Cold War. It is at once biography and history, and necessary to our understanding of our recent past–and of our selections for the future.
